Gilmore Girls

Why this new ‘Gilmore Girls’ Tumblr is brilliant

Before last night, I’d never really saw an entire episode of Gilmore Girls—despite the fact it had been directly in the combination of other WB television shows I was addicted to by the end of elementary school, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Charmed. Somehow, I was eluded by the early experiences of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, and once Buffy changed in the exact same time slot to UPN, there was essentially no way I was going to fall in love with Stars Hollow the manner a few of my buddies had.

And yet when I’d catch a minute of the show while channel surfing, there was something about it that left me feeling strange towards what looked like a totally good show in regards to a town of white, over-caffeinated Connecticutians. I could place my finger onto it.

This winter, after nine years of being off the atmosphere, Netflix brought Gilmore Girls out of retirement to get a victory lap of four 90-minute long mini-films investigating the Gilmores’ relationship as it had evolved because the show’s closing episode in 2007. Perhaps, I thought, things will be different this time. Perhaps Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life could function as the matter that’d get me hype to return and see a town obsess past a bed and breakfast.

As I dug into the initial episode of the newest Netflix show and saw Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel pretend to drink from coffee cups that have been definitely empty, that same feeling of apathy and moderate irritation creeped up my back and compelled me to pull out my phone to check out Twitter. As I swiped down my timeline, a haphazard Gilmore Girls-associated tweed slipped onto the display and stopped me dead in my courses.

“Twitter, I made you something,” writer Rahawa Haile tweeted. “My theory is the black people on Gilmore Girls are lost hosts from Westworld‘s unrevealed new story.

The matter she’d made was Gilmore Blacks, a Tumblr dedicated to recording each and every time a black performer appeared on the show, whether or not they discussed, and what they said—if anything. Each post features two of black celebrities or a screengrab walking in the background, doing yoga, staring —the type of thing one does in Stars Hollow—and brings attention to the truth that these individuals seldom do anything else. Their goal in the scenes, Haile insists, is little else and to last.

When Haile and I discussed by email, she described herself as a devotee of the initial show who was initially drawn in from the Northeastern dream of it all. But Haile clarified that while she fell in love using the first Gilmore Girls, how the new show manages its characters of colour made it feel somewhat inviting.

“We’re talking about a show that’s as white as they come (that’s good!)” she wrote. The whiteness isn’t the issue; the treatment of minorities is. They wander by means of a show set in the present that asks us to not think too hard about truly being a minority in the present, about that which we understand.”

Haile. It’sn’t at all unrealistic to envision that the town like Stars Hollow mightn’t possess the most ethnically varied people, but Gilmore Girls has some black and brown people on camera from time to time. The truth is, though, they’re only there. Like theatrical props. While you can find characters like Michel (Yanic Truesdale) and Lane Kim (Keiko Agena) who are given distinct styles and motivations, a large proportion of Gilmore Girls‘ non-white performers are there to be what Haile describes as “lampposts” with feet.

Gilmore Girls’ awkward way of people of color is that much more questionable when you consider scenes involving Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop), Lorelai’s old money, upperclass mom along with the family of nondescript Latinos that she lets move into her home to aid clean, but appears completely incapable of conveying with.

“What language is that?” Emily asks Rory after an exchange together with her maid. “I believed it was Spanish but then I ‘d the gardener attempt to share with her to come in early one day and he came back and said she wasn’t talking Spanish and it took me some time to realize what he was saying because I want the pool guy to interpret for the gardener.”

Netflix

One envisions the scene is designed to emphasize only how culturally out of sheltered and touch Emily is due to whiteness, privilege, and her wealth. But to get a show that’sn’t just famous because of its sharp interpretations of criticisms and brownish people of stuffy old white women, it makes these type of gags feel tonedeaf and insensitive.

The matter with the Gilmores’ maids as well as the mostly quiet black characters in the backdrop, Haile told me, was finally one and the same and had little to do with Gilmore Girls’ built-in whiteness. They only weren’t actually being given the same around of mankind.

The purpose is originators should make an effort to humanize. Constantly. High Maintenance, while a distinct form of show entirely, achieves this often,” Haile said. “If this isn’t a precedence for Gilmore Girls, thus be it. I’ll make a Tumblr asking for move and better